The Halfway Point: A Photo Essay

The fact that we're halfway done is nuts. But. More importantly, this past weekend we went on a three-day trip to see the border between North Korea and China. This will mostly be a photo-essay since I took so many pictures, so I hope you enjoy!

We started off with an overnight train ride to 丹东, with hard sleeper seats this time instead of soft sleepers - meaning no little cabins of four people, just a big open car divided into sections of 6 beds each. After playing cards for a bit with Jeff, his roommate, and 郭亭廷, we chatted for a long time before heading to bed around midnight. In the morning, we were in 丹东.

Hard sleeper cabin

From there, we headed to the local supermarket to buy lunch before making the two hour ride to a half-bridge to North Korea. We made a pit stop on the way and got our first look at 朝鲜.

At the supermarket...

Pitstop at 河口

A first view of 朝鲜

The half-bridge was also a memorial to Chinese involvement in the Korean War. While we were there, actually, a group of veterans from the Korean War and others came to visit as well. They were surprised by our group of Americans, but not hostile.

There were busts of soldiers lining one walk

Half-bridge to North Korea

Obligatory picture with me in it, and also 刘国勇 and 黄慧英

Video: The banks of North Korea

Veterans

From there, we headed to our hotel for the night, 满家寨满清园景观区, featuring traditional 满族 decorations and clothes. There, we watched an ethnic performance and then had a bonfire to roast lamb.

Our hotel's interior

The exterior

大鸦, or opium

On this picture...迟小波 asked 巴西's roommate, Tengfei, whether it was a "fun activity". This was out of a lack of a vocabulary - "fun activity" was used to mean drug, because after all, what Chinese textbook would include a chapter on drugs? - but Tengfei was a bit ruffled. "No, no, no," he said emphatically (he uses more English than many of the other roommates, but the rest of this conversation was in Chinese). "Like marijuana," he said, "very bad." "So...a fun activity, right?" 小波 responded. "No no no no no," Tengfei answered. "From England, right?" I asked, and added something about war. Tengfei seemed relieved and 小波 understood why Tengfei had been getting upset. The conversation was neither very tense nor very long, but between a person less relaxed than Tengfei or less genuinely kind than 小波 I can see how this might have been a difficult interaction. My belief in the importance of history/cultural understanding was reaffirmed.

The show we watched that night was interesting enough - not spectacular, but pretty and short.

Traditional 满族 dress

Lion dance!

Was beautiful

I liked the flags

Dragons

Video: Dragon Dance

After the show, we had our bonfire under some trees in the courtyard to avoid the rain. We taught our Chinese friends how to make s'mores! They were amazed by the concept of roasting marshmallows.

Lamb + marshmallows

There was karaoke

Video: 对面的女孩看过来

Also spontaneous fireworks

And an impromptu dance party in the rain! But I was too busy dancing to take pictures. The next morning we got to boat, see a thousand-year-old pine tree, and look at a waterfall, all before lunch!

Our boat

On a boat

Me on a boat

Riverside

Video: Moving Riverside

Thousand-year-old pine tree

Making wishes

Excellent Engrish

Waterfall!

Jeff and I, courtesy of his roommate Weiqiang

Chinese roommates having fun

These guys...

Afterwards, we returned to 满家寨 for lunch before heading to (a potentially fake) segment of the Great Wall/more looking at North Korea

长城

North Korea across the 鸭绿江

Ali and I at the highest outpost

The very, very steep way down

North Korea as seen from under an overhang in the mountain

Video: There was eerie music. I'm not sure if it comes through in the video, but it was there.

At the bottom, you could dress up in hanbok and take a picture in front of North Korea

It was only that far away...

That night, we stayed at a hotel in 丹东 proper, right near the banks of the 鸭绿江. We had an amazing experience with dinner. We went to a Korean restaurant right around the corner from our hotel, and got a private room because our group was 17 or 18 people strong. The room was beautiful. You had to take your shoes off in the entryway before stepping onto the raised platform that was the rest of the floor. The table was a round slab of wood over a sunken round cutout, and we sat on the floor with our legs dangling down into that hole. The windows of the room faced the river, and for some reason there was a great fireworks show on the banks of the river that night, as big as the ones on the 4th of July. We watched it for a while before indulging in delicious Korean food on CET's dime.

Afterwards, I ended up with a group of 8 male students intent on hunting down cold beer. There was none to be found, so they settled on warm ones from the supermarket before we all headed back to the banks of the river and met up with some other students. We hung out and chatted for a few hours, those who wanted drinking beer, all just enjoying ourselves. We Americans forgot that in the US one can't just drink in public until one of the Chinese roommates asked about it... I like the relaxed drinking laws in China. It makes for a much more laid-back dining.

The next morning, we took a boat ride on the river to look at North Korea again.

We're all 99% sure that ferris wheel is just for show

Note the North Korean flag being flown on these masts

Later, we headed to the city of 沈阳 in order to catch our train. With our 4 hours of free time before the ride back to 哈尔滨, we went to a big shopping street to look around. We ate at a famous dumpling restaurant and looked at the (already closed for the evening) 沈阳故宫.

So many peopleeee

老边饺子 were delicious, even if the service was terrible...

沈阳故宫

We found an arcade in a shopping mall to while away the rest of our time. Too much fun.

亭廷 plays "Tread Beetle"

慧英 plays air hockey

Tianbo races an armadillo?

Racing!

And the most fun game of all, throw balls at things like cats on bicycles

The ride home was fine, although we arrived at 6 am. I feel very, very bad for the people who had 8 am class on Monday. I didn't and I was still exhausted enough to be needing naps Tuesday afternoon.

And that ends this monster of a post! Sorry for multimedia-overload. One month left. Hoo boy.

Too many pictures

Apologies in advance for photo-overload.

So we're already halfway done with week 3 here in Harbin and time is flying. But before I talk about new stuff I should probably talk about the last week or so.

We moved into the international student dorms two weeks ago. Here are some pictures of my room (from before my roommate moved in):

My side of the room

My roommate's side

My roommate, 李斯琼 or Li Siqiong, is fairly quiet and very studious. Her major is something to do with circuitry? The small things inside cell phones and the like - that was as far as I got with my limited vocabulary. Because she had a lot of big tests the past few weeks, she often wouldn't come back to the room at night because she was studying. I think all the undergraduates just got finished with their classes for summer, but my roommate was still mysteriously missing this weekend and last night. It's nice being able to stay up late studying but...it's also kind of lonely. It's like the last time I came to China - I was the only girl in my group, so I always had a room to myself. No one to go out to breakfast or dinner with, no one to get me out of my room. But this time around I'm much more comfortable going out and finding things to do myself, and it really forces me to actively make friends with the other Chinese roommates. All in all I guess it's ok. And hopefully now that she's done testing my roommate will join in our weekend activities.

Speaking of which, this weekend we went hiking to celebrate the 4th of July. It was a lot of fun because a lot of the Chinese roommates joined us. It probably took us 3 hours to hike up the mountain - it was an easy climb, and we stopped a lot to chat and rest - and about an hour to hike down after chilling at the top for a bit.

Playing with a jianzi, I think it was called?

A big tower at the top of the mountain that we could climb

The landscape was, of course, beautiful:

This reminds me of that scene in Princess Mononoke...

I love the sky here in Harbin

My suitemate Ali and I

巴西 conquered the mountain with his walking stick.

On the way down, though, it started raining, and then pouring. It wasn't too bad while we were in the trees, but when we got down into flat plains and open farmland, there was water and mud everywhere. My white running shoes are now brown. But it was an adventure, and certainly worth the climb.

Crops, umbrellas and mud

The bus ride back was a wonderful nap. Since we were all wet and muddy, we had 15 minutes to change once we got back to the dorms, and then we all went out to dinner at the most amazing place I've been to yet.

It was called 金汉斯, or Golden Hans, and it was a German-themed Brazilian-style meat-skewer-place/buffet. All the workers were dressed in plaid and ruffles and the decor was going for old Germany. It was wonderful and we all stuffed ourselves, to stay the least. I had a good time talking to my friend Jeff's roommate, Weiqiang (I don't know the characters for his name).

The meat plate they kept refilling, but we could also go to the buffet. Amazing.

金汉斯

Note the authentic German decor...

BUTWEARESTILLINCHINA! as you can see

Anyway, on Sunday I went with Dung and 琼恩 to try to buy new clothes. I didn't bring many because clothes in China are cheap, and I didn't want to pack much. I kind of forgot how much I dislike haggling and how difficult sizes are to find in China, but thankfully the large market we went to was having a sale, so we weren't allowed to haggle. Being out and about in the city was nice, even though it was only for a few hours. I'd like to go back by myself sometime soon - I definitely didn't stop to look at everything I was interested in because I didn't want to bore my two male friends. We had a fun conversation at one point with these two middle-aged Chinese men. They (and all the storekeepers we talked to,actually) asked us the inevitable "where are you from? Oh, America!" kinds of questions, and inquired about my heritage. I cannot figure out why I have been taken for Asian so many times (my high school biology teacher? That doesn't even make sense). One of the shopkeepers we talked to told me my skin color was Chinese. But these two middle aged men in particular - after I explained to them that I was half black, one asked me if I was related to Obama. Excellent. Haha, of course I am. Didn't you know? I very much enjoyed our outing.

Outside of those two adventures, I've just been doing schoolwork, schoolwork, schoolwork. And eating. I love the supermarket too much. I go there all the time. This is very bad for my health, and so as to not come home 500 pounds heavier, I've started running. This is a miracle, really, because I usually avoid running at all costs. But I've discovered it's actually not that terrible, and I rather enjoy not having to think about anything.

We also started our extracurricular classes last week. I'm taking an erhu class and a Chinese cooking class. Our cooking teacher is amazing. 86 years old! And so energetic. Old Asian men are the best. For our first class we just talked about basic things, but this Friday and every Friday afterward we'll be going to his house to prepare dishes. I'm really excited to see what we get to make! Going into the erhu class, I somehow forgot that everything would be in Chinese. I am a musician but I know no musical vocabulary in Chinese. It was a bit difficult, but for this reason I am very glad I decided to sign up for this class at the last minute. I don't know what I'll do with my 180元 erhu when I return home, but the vocabulary will be invaluable

And along the lines of learning new vocabulary sets, I discovered that the woman who works in my favorite coffee shop loves Naruto - she noticed my Naruto wallet, of course. When she first commented on my wallet, I was so excited, but I quickly realized I had no words with which to discuss my favorite pastime. I did some searching around online and learned the names of the characters in Chinese, but all the manga scans online used traditional characters which I had no hope of reading. So last week I went to the newsstand outside our dorms and bought a recent volume of the manga (they sell manga at newsstands here!! Amazing). Thankfully it was simplified. So far I've only read through the first chapter, with much aid of a dictionary. But where I usually find constantly referring to a dictionary rather arduous, reading Naruto made it fairly enjoyable. And, as I discovered when trying to read an article about North Korea for my newspaper reading class, vocabulary about attacking things is pretty useful.

I think the best moments I have here (outside of good conversations) are when I can recognize characters without having studied them in-depth, or connect texts from one class to another place. This happens a lot with my one-on-one texts - in that class, we read through one xiangsheng per every two lessons, and while they're very interesting, they're also full of characters I don't know. But recognizing the word for "fan" in casual conversation from an old story about a Chinese painter, or recognizing "mount an attack" in the newspaper from reading Naruto - I feel like I'm learning all the time while I'm here in China. It's a great feeling. It's also really awesome to connect with people. I can't wait to play the Naruto PSP game with my coffee shop friend!

Anyway, I apologize for the long time since my last update. I'll try to write more often (and less lengthily) from now on. I've got homework to do. Talk to you all soon :)